My Ears Are Bent Read Online Free PDF Page A

corn whiskey was the only whiskey fit to drink and complain bitterly because The House refused to carry it. One night one of the bartenders went up to Harlem and bought a quart, and when the Southerner began complaining about never getting any goodold corn whiskey any more, he brought it out. The Southerner felt compelled to buy several drinks of it, and was sick for four days. When The House heard about it, he said, “We always try to please our customers.”
    The other Southerner is known in the place as Jeeter Lester. He does not like the South, because he could never make a living down there, and now he claims he was born at the northeast corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street. The small, sylvan Southern town in which he was born was so quiet that he takes a psychopathic delight in noise. When he empties a beer glass, he often buys it from the bartender and throws it on the floor. Sometimes the floor around his feet is ankle-deep in broken glass. He was once converted to the Baptist Church by a tent revivalist, and when he is blue he sings hymns. His favorite hymn is “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder I’ll Be There.”
    “I hope to God you don’t favor us with no hymns tonight,” The House says when he enters the place.
    Jeeter is an expert at snapping a coin, hidden between his fingers, against a highball glass the moment it touches his lips, making a noise as if he had bit a piece out of the glass. Then he screams and spits out a mouthful of ice, which looks a great deal like glass when it is flying through the air. It frightens new customers.
    “My God, man,” they say, “are you hurt?”
    “I am bleeding to death,” Jeeter moans, clasping his hand to his mouth and simulating expressions of extreme pain.
    There are quite a few women among the regular customers. About once a month a stout bookkeeper for a religious-goods house over on Barclay Street shows up. She used to be a singer in vaudeville. She is a matronly person, and she says she had rickets when she was a child and it left her with a nervous disorder. She has windshield scars running from ear to mouth on both sides of her face, but they do not make her self-conscious. She often points them out to people and says, “I am streamlined.” When she is full of beer, she climbs up on the bar and pretends she is sitting on a piano.
    “I got ants in my pants,” she sings in her lovely soprano voice. “I got a turtle in my girdle.”
    “I am being crucified,” The House screams, pushing her off the bar.
    The only man who ever died in this ginmill was a Mr. Friedman. He was extraordinarily fat. He ran a newsstand on West Street and sold newspapers to the New Jersey ferryboat commuters. He was a hardworking man during prohibition, when beer cost a quarter a glass, but when repeal brought the price down to ten cents, he would quit selling papers in themiddle of the day and hurry off to Dick’s. The night he died was after the day Wiley Post and Will Rogers crashed in Alaska. Everybody who passed the stand bought a paper, and by 3 P.M. he figured he had enough money in his coin apron to finance a night of beer-drinking. Every time Mr. Friedman finished a glass of beer, he would grunt and say, “Well, they can’t take that away from me.” He often complained about the steaks in the place.
    “This steak wasn’t hung long enough,” he would yell, stabbing the thick air with his fork. “I can’t eat this fresh meat. I ain’t no cannibal.”
    In the summer he slept in City Hall Park. Walking across the park to the Third Avenue El, I have often seen him stretched out on a bench, snoring to the moon. The place was full the night he died. He fell off his stool at the bar and began to gasp. The House ran to the booth and called the police. An ambulance doctor examined him while he was stretched out on the tile floor.
    “You can hardly call him a man,” said the young doctor. “He is just a living barrel of beer.”
    Just before he died he looked